Homeland (11 page)

I showered and peeled off the tape over my nose and grimaced at my beat-up face. Oh well, nothing to be done about it. Thinking of my mother's advice, I dug through my closet and found a white button-up shirt that I'd last worn to my graduation, and the grey wool slacks I'd worn at the same event. I even found the brown leather shoes that went with the outfit, and gave them a vigorous wipe with an old sock, bringing out a bit of a shine. As I buttoned up the shirt and tucked it in and got the line of buttons even with my fly, I found myself growing excited. Mom was right (as usual): dressing up made me
feel
competent, like the kind of guy you'd want to hire.

Dad was already at the kitchen table, eating oatmeal with sliced bananas and strawberries.

"Woah! You're looking suave, son," he said. I saw that he'd shaved off the stubble he'd sported the night before, and was dressed in his workout clothes.

"You going to the gym?" I said.

"Jogging," he said. "Just started. We're not using the gym anymore."
Translation: we can't afford the gym anymore.

"That's great," I said.

"Yeah," he said, and I wished I hadn't said anything, because he looked embarrassed, which wasn't usual for him. "Your mother told me about your big interview. There's more oatmeal on the stove and there's sliced fruit in that bowl."

Dad hadn't made me breakfast since I was thirteen years old, when I started insisting that I was too old to have breakfast prepared for me and switched to grabbing some toast on my way out the door. I realized he must have gotten up early just to make sure that I went off to Joe's office with a full tummy. It made me want to hug him, but something held me back, like acknowledging what a big deal this was would have spoiled the illusion of normalcy.

I hadn't seen 8 A.M. in the Mission since I dropped out of school. I stopped in at the Turk's for a lethally strong pour-over and let him fuss over me when I told him I was going in for a job interview. The Mission's always been a place with a lot of homelessness, but it seemed like things were worse than they'd ever been. At least, I couldn't remember seeing quite so many people sleeping on the edge of the sidewalk or in the doorways of boarded-up stores. I couldn't remember smelling quite so much pungent human pee-stink from the curbs.

I finished my coffee just as I reached Joseph Noss's campaign headquarters, between 22nd and 23rd on Mission, in a storefront that had been a huge discount furniture place for most of my life, but which had shut down the year before and had been sitting empty until now.

The big windows were plastered with orange and brown NOSS FOR STATE SENATE signs, neither Democrat blue nor Republican red. I checked my phone: 8:20. I was early. I tried the door, but it was locked. I rapped on the glass and peered in, trying to see if there was anyone inside. It was dark, and no one answered. I knocked again. Nothing. Oh, well. I stood by the door and waited for Flor Prentice Y Diaz, trying to project an air of employability.

She arrived at exactly 8:29, wearing blue jeans, a nice blouse, and a kerchief over her hair, and carrying a take-out cup from the Turk's. She had a serious, almost angry face on as she walked down the street, like there was a lot on her mind, but when she saw me, she smiled, then frowned as she took in my battered face. "Marcus?" she said.

I smiled back and extended my hand. "Hi there! Sorry about this --" I scrunched up my face. "I was at Burning Man last weekend and, well, a car exploded at me. It looks a lot worse than it is, really."

She shook my hand. Her grip was gentle, dry and warm. "I heard about that," she said. "Are you sure you're okay to be here? If you want to reschedule --"

I waved my hands. "No, no! Honestly, I'm fine. Besides, Joe -- Mr Noss -- said that he was in a hurry, right?"

"Well, that's very true. All right then, let's get inside, shall we?"

She dug a big key ring out of her handbag and opened the doors, reaching out with one hand to hit a lightswitch. The fluorescents flickered on all around the cavernous space, revealing trestle-table desks with snarls of power-strips beneath them. There were still signs advertising cheap sofas on some of the walls, and a long checkout counter that was now covered with silk-screening stuff. Someone had installed a big extractor fan over the table, but I could still smell the paint-y smell of the silk-screening station. Clotheslines hanging from the stained old drop ceiling were draped with shirts and posters in the campaign's orange and brown.

"This is where the magic happens," she said, crossing to a desk right in the middle of the floor. It had more papers on it than most, and a big external monitor. She slid a laptop out of her purse and connected its power cable and monitor cable and woke it up and entered her password. I politely looked away as she typed it, but I could hear that it was admirably long and complex -- there was also the telltale sound of a shift key being depressed and several of those unmistakable spacebar
bang
s.

"Sounds like a good password," I said.

"Oh yes," she said. "Ever since I had my Yahoo mail compromised a few years ago and everyone I knew got an email saying I was stranded in London after being mugged and asking for them to wire money to help me out. I expect you've got your own little security rituals, right?"

I nodded. "Just a few. But as soon as you start looking into security, you discover that there's always more you could be doing."

She was staring intently at her screen as her email streamed in. I noticed she wasn't breathing, which was something I'd read about: email apnea. People unconsciously hold their breath when they're looking at their inboxes. I made a mental note to mention it to her later if I got the job.

"I like your taste in coffee," I said, as she slumped back and gasped for air. "The Turk is awesome."

"He's one of a kind," she said, sipping. She'd pulled some papers from her purse. I recognized my resume. She tapped my address. "You live pretty close to here, huh?"

"Oh yeah," I said. "I went to Chavez High, just up the street."

"I sent my kids there, too. But that would have been before your time."

I was feeling good about the interview. We were bonding. We had all this stuff in common -- Chavez High, the Turk... We hadn't even talked about Barbara Stratford.

She set the resume down on her desk. "You seem like a very nice person, Marcus." Suddenly, I was a lot less confident. Her expression had turned into a professional mask. "But you don't exactly have a lot of work experience, do you?"

I felt my cheeks burning. "No," I said. "I mean --" I took a deep breath. "My dad got laid off from UC Berkeley last year and I had to drop out. No more discount tuition. So I've been looking for work ever since. But I've had some campaign experience, the Coalition of Voters for a Free America for two summers."

"Yes," she said. "Volunteer experience, right?"

"Right," I said. "We were all volunteers. But I'm very responsible. And I believe in Joe, and I believe that the Internet can change politics for the better -- make it more accountable, more transparent. That's why I want to work here."

As I said it, it felt like exactly the right sort of thing to be saying. But when I was done, her expression was harder than ever. "Yes," she said. "I've heard all that before. I've been hearing it for twenty years now. But the fact is that elections are won by a lot of shoe leather and a lot of money and a lot of hand-shakes, the way they always have been. I know that Joe has lots of pie-in-the-sky ideas about reinventing elections
and
reforming politics, but I run the campaign and I think that reforming politics will be a big enough job to get through, and maybe we can leave the reinventing stuff for the next candidate."

I didn't know what to say to that. Some innate, primitive sense of organizational politics told me I should just keep my mouth shut.

"We've got a lot of people around here with big ideas about how the world should be run. That's fine. That goes with the territory when you're running as an independent -- you get independent-minded people working for you. But the bottom line is that this is a
campaign
to
elect
a
candidate
. It's not a lab for egalitarian, consensus-based organizational reform. It's not a high tech startup.

"Right now, this campaign needs a
webmaster
. That's someone who'll put up a website that doesn't get hacked the minute we stick it online. That website's got to help us raise money, it's got to help us mobilize voters, and it's got to help us win an election. I want to make myself clear on this point, because I've hired a few webmasters in my day, and I know a thing or two about some of the problems endemic to the trade. I'm looking for a website that gets the job done: nothing more and nothing less. I don't want it to be one micron prettier than it needs to be. I don't want it to be one quantum more technically elegant than it needs to be. And because our webmaster is also going to be our IT department, I need someone who can keep us all reasonably secure, keep our computers backed up, and keep the network up. Someone who's available on-call twenty-four-seven right up to election day.

"So, now that you've heard my little speech, I need to ask you, does that sound like you, Marcus?"

But Joe said he wanted a delta-force ninja,
is what I didn't say. I had already figured out enough to know that what Joe wanted and what Joe got was filtered through his campaign manager, who held the decision to hire me in her hands.

"I have done all those things in the past," I said. "I'm reliable. I'm a fast learner. I believe in Joseph Noss. I may not have had much work experience, but that's only because no one's given me the chance. There are lots of people in San Francisco who could be your webmaster, but how many of them have helped run an underground network that beat back the DHS and restored the Bill of Rights to San Francisco?" I spent most of my life telling people that M1k3y was just part of a movement, scuffing my toe when people told me how much they admired me. But something told me that this wasn't the right time to be humble.

Her smile came back. "Okay, that was well said." She finished off the Turk's coffee. "I've asked around about you. Barbara Stratford called me as I was on my way in to work this morning to put in a good word for you. There are lots of people who think the world of you as a leader and a techno-guerrilla. But none of them have ever employed you, and we have more than enough 'leaders' around here. Have you ever read
The Time Machine
, Marcus?"

"Yeah," I said. "I wrote a paper on it in AP English."

"Then you'll remember the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi were the privileged surface dwellers, enjoying a life of high-tech sophistication and ease. But under the ground, there was an army of Morlocks, toiling away night and day in the subterranean engine rooms, making sure that everything was humming along tickedy-boo."

"You want Morlocks, not Eloi, right?"

She smiled. "Bright boy. Yes, exactly. It's not a glamorous job, but it's the job that needs doing. What I'm asking you to do now is look inside yourself and ask, 'Do I want to do the job that needs doing, even if it's boring and workaday and merely necessary and not at all exciting? You say you believe in Joe -- do you support him enough to join his army as a grunt and not a general?"

I could see why she was the campaign manager, and not Joe. Joe had made me want to take to the streets, but she made me want to prove I could get the job done. They must make a great team.

Which is not to say that I wasn't disappointed. I
had
hoped that I'd be greeted as a revolutionary hero and given a squadron of tough info-commandos to boss through a series of action-hero adventures. But the way that Flor Prentice Y Diaz pushed at me, implying that I was just a kid who wanted the spotlight more than he wanted to help, it was like a set of spurs in the belly. So even as I was thinking,
Man, that's an effective motivational technique
, I was also thinking,
I'll show her!

I made a showy salute. "Yes ma'am, general, ma'am."

Her smile got wider. "All right, all right. I'm giving you a hard time this morning, because you come with a lot of advance recommendations, but there are also lots of warning flags. You're a bright young man, and bright young men are nice to have around, but in my experience, they need quite a lot of adult supervision. So I intend on
supervising
you very closely until I'm convinced that you have learned the difference between what we need and what you'd like us to have."

I blinked and replayed what she just said. "Does that mean I'm hired?"

She waved off the question. "Oh, Marcus, you've been hired since we sat down here. Joe loves you, or at least he loves your reputation, and he's as excited as a puppy about having you around here. But I needed to make sure you understood what working here entails."

I couldn't stop myself, I held my arms over my head like a quarterback after a touchdown: "All
right!
" I shouted.

She laughed at me. "Down, boy. Yes, you've got a j-o-b. Marian, our HR person, will talk over your pay and such with you later. But before we get started, there's one thing we need to discuss, and that's all this hacker business."

I composed myself. "Yes?"

"Don't. Do. It. You've done all sorts of clever things with computers, no doubt. You've outsmarted the feds and raided their data, you've gone wandering around computer systems where you had no business being. It's all in the grand old tradition of the Bay Area, but it has no place here. The first time I catch so much as a
whiff
of anything illegal, immoral, dangerous, or 'leet'" -- she made finger quotes -- "I will personally bounce your ass to the curb before you have a chance to zip your fly. Do I make myself crystal clear?"